


Decibel

by Yina_Ke



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, College Feels, Identity Porn, LOTS of booze, M/M, Mentions of past Danny/Trevor, Oral Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-16
Updated: 2014-02-16
Packaged: 2018-01-12 16:19:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1191753
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yina_Ke/pseuds/Yina_Ke
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Danny, college, and that possibly homicidal roommate thing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Decibel

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Annie_Is_A_Contranym](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Annie_Is_A_Contranym/gifts).



> This is for you, annienmilton. We've never interacted (yet), but I hope that you will find some joy with this gift, even if most of it _was_ written during all-night Red Bull-fueled writing extravaganzas. :)
> 
> At this point, I also need to say a giant _thank you_ to the mods of the TW Rare Pair Exchange, for being extremely accommodating to me, and always remaining nice and approachable. 
> 
> Also, a shout-out to my beta, tumblr user teenwolfloser -- who is decidedly _not_ a loser, and has picked up the worst of the atrocious typos resulting from the aforementioned Red Buell-sponsored writing escapades. You're an absolute catch. All remaining errors are my own.
> 
> So, this fic. As is prone to happen to me, this fic grew a mind of its own a couple of thousand words in, and is now a lot longer (and quite a bit more dramatic) than I thought it would be. I wanted it to be a cute, mindless college AU. The fic knocked me over with a bat, seized control of my body, and skipped off to be an overly long 14k mindless college AU sprinkled with identity angst instead. I. Um. Well.
> 
>  _Anyway_ , Brookfield University is entirely fictional because ~~I ran out of time to do research~~ I made use of artistic license. 
> 
> Warnings: non-graphic mentions of mental torment and anxiety.
> 
>  _Decibel_ refers to both the AC/DC song by the same name as well as the logarithmic unit, and I've now officially run out of things to say, so _here we go_.

The first thing Danny sees of his roommate is his butt.

It's a clothed butt, currently bulging against faded jeans that are cinched at the bent hips and dangle down his legs. Danny can't see the boy-that-is-attached-to-the-ass properly from here; he's bent down, face hidden by the angle. There's a mop of brown hair, and pale skin that's possibly made paler by the eye-watering electric blue of his hoodie.

Then there's a flash of eyelashes and the slope of a sharp cheekbone when he shifts, and Danny's going to blame all of that ( _and_ the aforementioned butt) to justify why it's taken him approximately three entire seconds to determine that the current situation can summarily be explained the dropped pencil to the boy's feet.

“Hi,” Danny says.

 The boy's back straightens and his hips swing around, and Danny's staring at a pair of large eyes framed by floppy brown hair and a mouth that drops to hiss, “Whoa. What the fuck, man? _Knocking_? Ever heard of the _knocking_?”

 Well, this is a plot twist Danny didn't expect.

“This is my dorm room,” Danny says.

“No, it's not,” the guy says.

“I think the key would know if it wasn't.”

“Keys don't know anything, they're _keys,_ ” the guy says, narrowing his eyes. “I got assigned a _single_ room. Single. As in, 'without another person in it' single.”

Danny drops his bag on the floor. Mostly because he's tired after he just spent what seems like the past couple of _days_ driving across the country, all after awkwardly patting his heaving mother's shoulder, and promising to tell Leila _everything_ only to then _attempt_ to revise it with a 'but no X-rated stuff' rule. It's only a little bit because this guy is already getting on his nerves.

“Well, I got assigned _this_ room,” Danny says. “I have a sign-in sheet if you want to see it. I even got your name on it.” He's got no idea how to pronounce his first name, but – “Your name is – Stilinski?”

“Stiles,” the guy says. “It's _Stiles,_ and I'm going to murder someone at the registration office _.”_

“Okay,” Danny says. He half-heartedly apes his new maybe-roommate's exaggerated facial tics when he pronounces him, “ _Stiles_. I'll be nice and say I didn't hear that if they come knocking about the dead body.”

“Thanks, man,” Stiles says, and bends down to stuff his clothes back into his bag. Danny watches how his fists clench around the clothing and send ripples tension up his biceps, and Danny wonders what the hell is wrong with this guy.

Then Stiles says, “But don't worry about any dead bodies. I'm a Sheriff's son, I learned the tricks of the trade,” and Danny promptly decides that it's probably a lot more than he cares to know.

 

-

 

Stiles rushes back into the room exactly one hour and thirty-two minutes after their first meeting. Danny had checked; it had been _memorable_ , all right.

Danny greets him with, “For someone who insists that this isn't his room, you sure waltz in like it is.”

Stiles stops in his tracks. “I never said it wasn't my room. I said it wasn't _yours_.”

“Yeah, you were just kind of a dick,” Danny says, and looks up from where he's been busy folding his clothes into the closet space. “So, any luck?”

“No,” Stiles says, and stomps over to one of the beds. “They messed up. I specifically applied for single-room housing, and they couldn't even – shit, I'm getting mad just thinking about it. I put it in the application, bolded it twice, _and_ circled it with eye wateringly neon-green magic marker. How the _fuck_ did they mess this up? And now they say that they can't give me single-room housing _at all_ , which means I'm now stuck with you. Which, you know, no offense to you personally.”

“Yeah, well, as I said about the dick thing,” Danny says. “Sucks for you, though.”

Danny thinks that Stiles seems remarkably okay with being called a slang term for the human penis, but then he figures that being called such is probably not a rare occurrence for him.

This, the callous acceptance of their own moral shortcomings, sort of reminds Danny of Jackson, except that this Stiles guy is nothing like Jackson at all. Jackson, he's all measured meanness and perfectly-sculpted jabs. Stiles seems to be a ball of energy armed with spikes that doesn't care what it cuts and what it doesn't.

Stiles drops down onto the bed face-first, sighs, and then flops over onto his back to flip his cell phone open.

Just _why_ is it so important for him to get a single? Danny decides not to ask. He suspects that if he did, he would come to regret it at some point. Or that a part of him would. Like, literally, a _part_ of him, because Stiles might cut him up, and – okay, nah, maybe not. Dude's kind of skinny.

So Danny clears his throat, goes back to sorting in his clothes, and says, “So, not so much with the dead bodies, I take it?”

“Sadly,” his new roommate says, his eyes scanning his cell phone's display, “not yet.”

“Boy, college will be magical,” Danny tells his opened closet.

 

-

 

College really isn't magical. 

Danny already knew this.

He remembers arguing on the playground once, telling a chubby-faced kid with curly hair that Santa Claus couldn't logically exist because he learned on Discovery Channel that it's physically impossible to compress time and space and be everywhere at once for one night of the year. No, he always knew this, also knew to prioritize the cool, hard facts. Trust numbers and reason. Don't trust unproven and emotionally biased hypotheses.

He hasn't always been the best follower of his own philosophy, and it's at this point he snarls  _shut up_ at the distorted presence of Trevor, somewhere at the back of his mind, and _my entirely illogical and also absolutely_ done with _devotion to you notwithstanding._ Point is, Danny hasn't had grand illusions about college. He knew that it was much less about self-discovery these days as it was about ticking off little boxes on a must-do list that ranged from mind-numbing internships at places you didn't care about to tolerating pompous assholes of professors that went back and forth on which citation rules they wanted you to follow.

None of that seems to have prepared him for what it's really like.

Brookfield University spirals up around him in tall buildings that _breathe_ importance and intellectualism. They sprawl up before him, all baroque and European-looking, entirely besieged by memorial stones accruing the history of various benefactors. Other students crawl between the buildings in groups, most of them wearing colors as muted as the New England sky above. He can tell which of the other students are freshmen: they all have a sense of wonder about them.

All but Braeden.

Braeden is brazen and sharp-tongued and she openly leers at his abs before she even asks him his name. He tells her that he's gay, but she only flashes him a sharp grin, saying, “A girl can still look, though, can't she?” and he decides he likes her.

He also likes that she doesn't cover up the scars on her neck, the horizontal slashes, the tissue pale and stark against her dark skin. She doesn't wrap herself in scarves, doesn't self-consciously let her hands linger around her neck; she wears them proudly, like armor, like a signature, and it echoes on Danny's chest and lower, where his own scars are.

Classes are mostly boring, like he'd thought they would be. He's taking a lot of general electives his first semester, but he's managed to get a couple of basic Physics classes. He scans the curriculum to determine that they look like they'll start to get mildly challenging around the semester's halfway point.

Leila calls him every day and screeches into his ear when he picks up. She asks him about college, and he lies his way through the conversation and drops strategically-placed questions about their parents.

“Your sister?” Braeden's eyes sprint at him from across the table. One of her fingernails scratches along the rim of her glass of lemonade.

“Yeah,” Danny says with a shrug, and pockets his phone. He turns back to her, bracing his arms on the table. “Sorry about that. What were you saying?”

She arches one eyebrow at him. “Has anyone ever told you that you're a horrible liar?”

“It may have come up once or twice,” Danny says evenly.

“Oh thank God, that restored some of my faith in humanity,” she says. “Not that it's any of my business, of course.”

“Of course,” Danny says. A beat. “So what are you doing later today?”

She flips her hair over her shoulder. “Going to that bar I saw just down the road off-campus. With you. And our fake IDs.”

“Are you now?”

“Yepp. Pretty sure I am. You've got to go; everyone _else_ I've met Fresher's week has been either an asshole, an idiot, or a complete fucking _bore_. You, you're nice, though. And hot.”

“Why does everyone think I'm nice?” Danny asks. “I once spent an entire day trolling 2chan by pretending to be a bisexual girl with three boobs. Straight men are not half as turned off by the prospect of a medically alarming increase in mammary glands as I thought they'd be.”

“Eye-opening, I'm sure,” Braeden says. “You'll have to do a lot better than that to scare me off. Seven good for you?”

Danny raises an eyebrow.

“With your roommate situation,” Braeden says, “I'd be stunned to hear you had anything better to do.”

Danny stays quiet, looking out through the window of the coffee shop at the passing students. The sky is grey and low below a struggling sun. Students hurry past swathed in thick clothes in muted colors, carrying books and umbrellas and cheap but practical bags. Danny misses California.

 _Stiles_ is from California, too. Danny learned this during one of their ten-second conversations before the guy almost-but-kind-of _fled_ from their dorm room.

Apart from his being from California, there's other miscellaneous information that Danny has surmised through observation. 

Stiles returns at night looking worn out, spends much of the night in front of his laptop only to then fold himself into his bed without a spare glance. He lives on approximately thirty-two cups of coffee a day, along with enough spoonfuls of sugar that Danny's teeth throb in sympathy pains. Stiles majors in IT, seems to have no idea how social interaction works, and coasts along on random non-sequiturs. Stiles acts as if it makes perfect sense to ask Danny what he thinks of iron maidens after he's been ignoring him in favor of looking at what looked like 18th century torture devices for an entire afternoon, and _yeah_ , all of that?

Weird.

“Considering I'm still not certain he's not really an escaped axe murderer, I probably do in fact not have anything better to do,” Danny admits. “Hold on, not an axe murderer. Too much blood and too much paperwork. Poison seems more like his MO.”

“I don't know, he sounds kind of sadistic. How about a poison-dipped surgical knife to the liver?”

Danny gives her a _stare_.

Braeden shrugs, flashes him a smile, fishes a ten dollar note out of her wallet, and slaps it onto the table. “For my coffee.”

“And I thought it was to mend my ego,” Danny says, voice dry.

“Sweetie, money won't help you there. Try getting laid.”

Braeden really does have a way with words.

 

-

 

“So, what do you think?” Braeden asks, her black stiletto heels skittering to a halt in front of a dimly-lit place. “It's the nicest-looking bar I could find in the vicinity. Everywhere else looked like Hook-Up Central or like some pretentious hippie hangout. This strikes a balance, no?”

“Well.” A black-lettered sign that reads _Wolfsbane_ in huge gothic font sways in the evening breeze, accompanied by a mechanic little _creak-creak-creak_. The front door looks old, wood veined with splashes of decorative silver. The half-barricaded windows allow dim splashes of yellow to pool on the pavement. “It looks like a biker bar with one of those 'danger: members only' signs on the front door and AC/DC blaring inside.”

“Which would be why it's _awesome_ ,” Braeden says. She hooks her arm with Danny's and tugs. “C'mon.”

Inside, it smells of smoke, wood, and a mélange of mingled perfume; it's a little sweet, a little spicy. The square room unravels before them, drenched in dimmed lights and pulsating with rock music that's just loud enough so that Danny can feel it in his blood, but quiet enough that he can hear Braeden say, “I've been here before. That's Erica over there.”

A woman's wiping the bar counter; she glances up when Danny and Braeden enter. Her eyeliner-rimmed eyes burn right into Danny's.

Danny thinks she looks kind of menacing but only up until she twists ruby-red lips into a crooked smirk, straightens her back, and calls, “Hey. Look who we got here.” She sends a glance toward a stony-faced waiter standing in the corner. Upon catching the bartender's eyes, the waiter looks over at Danny, and raises one eyebrow.

  
Danny's not sure if he likes the way the blonde woman's looking at him, but he supposes college is shaping up to be an excellent practice in tolerating objectification. “Hi,” he says, and with a last look at Braeden, he slips onto the bar stool. “I'm new.”

“Hello New, I'm Erica,” she says easily. “Your parents hippies, too?”

“My mother is a Hawaiian florist,” Danny says.

“Close enough then,” Erica says. “I trust you're twenty-one or older, because this is a respectable establishment.”

“Clearly,” Danny says. “On both accounts.”

Erica stares at him. Then she glances at Braeden. “I think I like him.”

“I knew you would,” Braeden says, and taps Danny on the shoulder. “Show her your ID, though, since this really _is_ respectable, you wiseass.”

And when Danny watches Erica glance at his ID, then smile, return it, lean in and ask him in a slow drawl what he'll have, all movie sexy bartender style, he thinks that college may not be so bad after all. Or at the very least, that he'll be able to get through his four years here, have a modicum of fun, get laid a couple of times, and leave with his sanity and all four limbs mercifully intact.

That's until a few hours, three Long Island Iced Teas (“It's New England,” Braeden said), some banter and drunken appreciations of AC/DC later, he notices that over there, hunched in the corner of the bar with his cell phone in front of him, is _Stiles_. The sight is so absurd that Danny halts in the middle of a retelling of that one time he and Jackson put helium-filled condoms into the Dean's office to say, “Fuck, that's _him_.”

Braeden blinks, turns around, and looks around the room. “The murder roomie?”

Erica tosses her mane of hair over her shoulder. “Oh, that's Stiles over there. Bit of a weird kid, but he's kind of cute. Mostly he just comes in here alone and sits around and texts someone.” She pauses, and her grin is sharp and quick. “Wait a minute, _you're_ the hot roomie?”

“I'm the --” Danny sighs. “I'm both way too drunk and too confused to consider the implications of that.”

“I know, beauty is such a burden,” Erica says. “In other news, you should go talk to him.”

“You want me to go over there and talk to the guy who, since he started living with me a few days, has barely exchanged more than five hundred words with me, an approximate eighty percent of which were related to grisly murders and dead bodies?”

Erica gives him an even look. “Yes.”

“ _Yes_ ,” Braeden says. “What's the worst that could happen? Shoo.” Braeden nudges him off his bar stool with her thigh then turns to Erica. “So, as I was saying, I was thinking of getting a Harley, but they're expensive and also a bit too _Hell's Angels_ , so I think --”

Danny stands there frozen for a few beats until the booze in his system decides to abandon basic measures of self-preservation and guide his body along the smoke-filled bar to Stiles' table, because why the hell not? It's so _weird_ to see Stiles in this place that Danny can't deny that he's curious.

When Danny comes to a halt in front of his table, Stiles shifts his eyes, drags them up along Danny's body, and then lets them fall right onto his face.

“Okay, so what are _you_ doing here?” Stiles asks, his voice carrying the slur of alcohol.

“I don't know, it's a bar,” Danny says. “What do people usually do in bars?”

It takes Stiles a few seconds to reply to that. “Planning world domination?”

“I mean, what do _normal_ people do in bars,” Danny says, and then, because he doesn't have anything better to do and because he's admittedly _really_ kind of curious, he pulls up a chair and sits down uninvited.

Stiles has his cell phone on the table. Danny catches the picture of a dark-haired boy with dimples, but then Stiles follows his gaze and pockets the phone with a sour look. “Dude. _Privacy_.”

“You did a complete background check on me the minute you resigned yourself to the fact that you had to live with me,” Danny says. “You're hardly one to talk.”

“I --” Stiles' eyes widen then narrow. “Did you hack my laptop?”

“No, I guessed,” Danny says. “Correctly, I assume.”

Stiles gives him a measured look.

Sometimes, when they're in their room, Stiles gives him a specific look, focused and calm, as if he's trying to analyze him and compress all that Danny is into easily understandable bits of information. Now, Stiles' gaze is mellow around the edges, and his are eyes softer; the edges are whittled down and dull, the heat of curiosity chilled down to acceptable measures. Stiles may have to be drunk more often.

So, Danny decides to tell him that. 

“Dude,” Stiles says in reply. “Do not suggest prolonged functional alcoholism to me as a means of coping with my nature.”

Danny is tempted to say that that doesn't sound too bad, but something in Stiles' eyes and his tone makes him swallow his words. He may be drunk, but he's not _that_ drunk yet.

But not sober enough to hold his tongue when he says, “Any other mediating, temper-evening substance you could try?”

Stiles gives him a _look_. “I thought being the evil roomie was _my_ job.”

“Well, I guess that it's got another applicant,” Danny says, and then, because he didn't come here to pick on Stiles, he amends that with, “What do you want to drink? I'm buying.”

Stiles gives him a long look, and Stiles, Danny has figured out by now, only comes in two modes: quiet serial killer observation, and words fired with the speed and rhythm of a malfunctioning machine gun.

Stiles leaps into, “What the hell, dude? I thought we weren't exactly friendly. I mean, I know in college you're supposed to make friends with your roommate, because that could be really beneficial and there's this unspoken social contract that when you're on good terms with your roommate, you can bring someone to your room to get laid and they'll be gracious enough to let themselves be exiled, but I didn't think --”

“Whiskey, then,” Danny says evenly. “I'll be right back.”

A couple of minutes, a raised eyebrow (from Erica) and a cryptic smirk (from Braeden) later, Danny half-walks, half- _swaggers_ back to the table and unceremoniously places four shots on it before he collapses into his seat. “Hi, I'm Danny.”

Stiles gives him a blank look. It clears when he says, “Oh. You're trying to do that 'let's forget the past and leap anew into a new and promising future' thing.”

“Or something like that,” Danny says. He raises his glass and tilts it into the direction of Stiles. “Cheers.”

Stiles locks his jaw and raises his own glass to meet Danny's. They clink together, light from the dim bar lights up ahead racing along the rims, and after Danny's scrunched his eyes shut and downed half the glass and felt it set his esophagus on fire, Stiles' face looks a good deal blurrier than it did before.

“Brrrr.” Stiles shudders, and puts the glass down hard enough that it makes the table shiver. “ _Burns_.”

“More of a cocktail type?” Danny asks.

“Nah.” Stiles licks his lips in an exaggerated way that reminds Danny half of a dog and half of really lewd porn stars. “Not the really sweet ones anyway, the ones that are all pink or baby blue and stuff – not because they're for girls or gay men – stereotypically, I mean, I don't actually know much about the actual booze habits by demographic affiliation -- 

His eyes are an interesting color, Danny thinks. They looked bright in their dorm room, beneath the harsh lights, light brown or amber, but beneath this light, there's more of a golden tint, and right – the guy's _talking_.

“-- and uh, do _you_ like cocktails?”

“Not particularly,” Danny says. He pauses, weighs his options, skids along the precipice of the decision, and then decides to barrel right down because fuck it, he's drunk, and so: “Only one of the two, anyway.”

“Cocks and... tails?” Stiles asks slowly.

“Yeah.”

Stiles frowns.

“Jesus,” Danny says. “Yes, I'm saying that I'm gay.”

“Dude, I _got_ that,” Stiles says. “I was just wondering if you couldn't think of a way to tell me that without also leaving open the possibility of beastiality.”

“Because that was the more reasonable conclusion to come to,” Danny says, deadpan.

“Not at all, but it was you who implied it could be one or the other, which means that within the realm of possibilities --”

“Yeah okay, now can you shut up before we spend the rest of the evening discussing the history of beastiality on the Northern continent?” Danny says.

“That – I was _not_ going to talk about that.”

“So that one time you derailed a discussion about difficult IT exams into medieval torture devices was just a scare tactic?”

Stiles rolls his eyes. “No, that was totally me testing your reaction in order to find the most personally scarring one for you. D'uh. _No_ , that was my area of interest at the time. I go through phases with those. A couple of weeks ago, I was fascinated with South American _birds_. Don't read too much into it.” A pause. “I can talk about normal stuff, too. Why did you feel you had to tell me that anyway? That you're gay.”

Danny shrugs. “I thought it was something you should know, given that we _are_ stuck with each other for the semester. I just couldn't think of a way to let you know discreetly before.”

“Well,” Stiles says, “playing gay porn at a high volume may have clued me in.”

“Yeah, I think it's time for another shot,” Danny says. “Let's finish those and let me get back to my friend.”

Stiles looks like he's about to say something more, but then swallows it down and stares at his one remaining shot. He's presenting Danny with one of the very rare opportunities to watch him without being watched in return and Danny, well, seizes it.

Stiles is fiddling. His foot is beating against the floor, and not in tune with _Eye of the Tiger_ blaring from the speakers, but with a pulse of his own. His eyes scan the glass, his lashes flutter. He's studying it, but in a superficial way, taking in the properties but not analyzing them. He's thinking about something else, and Danny feels the sudden, unfamiliar, entirely unsettling desire to know _what_.

Reaching for his glass, Stiles locks eyes with Danny's. “Cheers.”

Glasses clink, and Danny brings his to his mouth, tilts back his head, and downs the shot. It stomps down his breath and churns in his stomach, but he grimaces through it and puts the glass down.

When he meets Stiles' eyes, he finds them unfocused. “Oh man,” Stiles says. “I haven't been this drunk in, like, a long time. Probably not since that one time that I comforted Scott after he split up with his girlfriend and his mom found us passed out on the couch in a puddle of drool of unknown origin. And _definitely_ not since that one time when he and I got really drunk on our vacation in Pasadena and we – uh.” Stiles raises his hand, and mimes rapid up and down strokes. “ _Yeah_.”

“Oh.” Danny says. “You two sound nice.”

Stiles stares at him. A beat, then two, then _three_ , and then –

He throws up his hands, recoils, and his lips snag back to release a startled laugh. “Oh no. No, no, no. Shit. We didn't – we scratched each other's backs. With. Back scratchers. We got a matching pair, you know. We were so drunk and scratched each other for so long that I woke up the next morning with a sore back and one of those doomed-to-failure promises never to drink again. But me and Scott, we aren't like that, we're just best buds for life, you know? And yeah, anyway, Scott... isn't.”

Danny almost wants to ask, _Scott isn't, but you are_? He doesn't, because he knows too well how important it is to be given the agency to come out at your own time.

“Okay,” Danny says, and then spends a full couple of seconds trying to come up with something else to say. “Okay. Good.”

“Okay, _listen_.” Stiles breaks off, and fiddles some more. His gaze spins around the room, skidding across the walls to the bar counter, over the other people, and up to the lights. Then it lands on Danny. Stiles seems to hype himself up, only to fall short at the last moment. He looks a bit like a blow-up doll being filled with air that's deflated at the last moment every time it's about to gain full form, up until Stiles finally _bursts_ with, “Listen – about that first time we met, in my room?”

“Our room,” Danny corrects.

Stiles raises an eyebrow. “ _Our_ room. It wasn't your fault that the university screwed up and only very narrowly evaded an increased body count --”

“So you did _actually_ not kill anyone,” Danny says. “I'm relieved to hear that.”

Stiles deflates. “Dude. I'm having a moment here, can you cool it with the wiseass comments?”

“I adapt to my environment.”

Stiles' focus wanders, and he stares into space. “Fuck, is _this_ why Allison said I was insufferable?”

“Self-reflection is important,” Danny says. “But please continue. The first time I ran into you in our room and you then ran off with threats of impending murder, you...?”

“Well, I was a dick,” Stiles says, and once again doesn't seem averse to the moniker. “And that's who I am, but it wasn't cool, because none of it --”

“Hey,” a voice says. Stiles shuts his mouth. Danny turns around to look at Braeden standing before him. “Sorry to interrupt your 'moment' here,” she says, and this woman truly has a gift for audibly sarcastic quotation marks, “but I was gonna leave. I was thinking the club down the road. You coming, Danny?”

 Danny looks from Braeden to Stiles and back to her again, weighing his options.

Braeden's being a good friend by giving him an easy and polite way out of this. He doesn't _have_ to listen to any more of Stiles' drunken ramblings, nor his inelegant attempts at socializing or his frequent sarcasm-tinged jabs, and that -- well, that –

Stiles was going to tell him something, though. Also, Danny's having fun. Fuck, he's having _fun_.

Danny looks over at Stiles, who's gone back to nursing the beer he'd been drinking before Danny bought him the shots. His gaze it swept to the side, focused on the dingy wall.

Danny says, “That's okay, Braeden, you can go on without me. We're just having a good talk Stiles and I,” and he's sure that's the alcohol talking. The alcohol is eloquent indeed.

So is Braeden's eyebrow raise, and the subsequent shit-eating grin. He's going to hear about this. He's possibly not going to hear the _end_ of this.

“All right then, boys.” Braeden shrugs into her leather jacket. “You stay here and talk. Be merry, have fun, stay safe, all that.”

“Talk to you _later_ , Braeden,” Danny says, but she's already twirled around and started swaggering away. Danny keeps his eyes on her form until she's at the door, and only tears it away when it shuts behind her.

Danny looks at Stiles over the space of their table. Stiles looks back at Danny.

“I'll get us one more shot each,” Danny says. “This could take a while.”

“How do you know that?” Stiles says, and he's looking at Danny from a distance now, his eyes narrower than before.

“Inference from my – admittedly small – pool of existing statistical data,” Danny says.

Stiles blinks. “You're a nerd.”

“Yeah, I'm gonna make that two,” Danny says, and gets up.

 

–

 

The subject of their ill-fated first meeting is dropped and forgotten by the time Danny has returned to the table, and when they've each finished their additional two shots, Stiles kind of looks blurry enough that he _has a halo_ , which Danny takes as a sign that serious discussion-time has bowed out and left the stage in order to make room for – well. Danny's not sure what this is.

Stiles leans in and bathes Danny in a moist stream of booze-flavored breath when he says, “Hey, Danny. Danny, Danny. I got one. How many programmers does it take to screw in a light bulb?”

“None. It's a hardware problem,” Danny says.

“Ah, damn.” Stiles slaps a palm against the table. “You stole my thunder. I was _thundering_ here.”

“Everyone knows that one,” Danny says. “Try again.”

“Okay, hang on just a second. Hang on, hang on, I've got _tons_ of these.” Stiles' eyes roll upward in thought, the tip of his tongue pressed between his lips in concentration. Sudden energy zips through Stiles and spills out through his mouth in a triumphant, “Hah, I _got_ one.” He raises his hand and slaps it down against the table, hard. “I got one – ow. _Owww_. Fuck.”

The laughter bubbles in Danny's stomach. He tries to hold it in, at first, but then it boils over, hikes up his throat and spills out.

“Stop laughing,” Stiles says. “I said --”

“Fine. Fine.” Danny bites down the last of his chuckles, and straightens his back. “You were saying? You got one?”

“Yeah. Why do programmers always mix up Halloween and Christmas? Huh?”

“Don't know.”

“ _Hah_. Because Octal 31 is equal to Decimal 25.”

Danny snorts. “Shit. That one's hilarious.”

“I know, right? Classic. Okay, next one: why do programmers --”

“People are looking at us funny,” Danny says.

Stiles skids to a halt in enthusiasm and gives Danny a searching look. “You care about that?”

“Everybody cares about what people think.”

“Well, _I_ don't care that they're looking at us funny just because we're cracking IT jokes in the middle of a biker bar. What's _not_ awesome about that?” Stiles catches the scrutinizing look of a dark-haired guy to his left, and drawls, “Hey, do _you_ have a problem with it? Programming jokes are fucking funny as --”

“Stiles, you're drunk. Shut up.”

Stiles looks back at Danny. The guy to the left who may probably have become Stiles' first bar fight ever looks away, whispering something into the ear of the girl he's with.

“ _You're_ drunk, too,” Stiles says.

“Yeah. Maybe. I guess I am. Not as drunk as you, though.”

“Oh, you did _not_ ,” Stiles says. “Sobriety test, right _now_. Go on, come at me.”

“What would a sober person do if their roommate was drunk in a bar?”

“Depends. Is this a riddle? Are there any sharpies around? Kidding, kidding, okay. They'd take the drunk roommate home, I guess.”

“Exactly,” Danny says. “And you claim to be sober, but I've just admitted to being drunk.”

Stiles narrows his eyes.

Danny slaps Stiles on the arm, and says, “It's been a fun night, but I think we're kind of wasted,” and only realizes seconds after that it really _was_ fun, annoyances aside.

Stiles rubs his left ring finger between two fingers of his right, licks his lips, and then says, “Okay, I just -- just remembered I was gonna say something. About the first meeting.”

A peach-red blush pulses on Stiles' face, just beneath the skin of his cheeks. Most of it is probably from the alcohol, but he's fiddling, writhing like a fish on the hook, his eyes bugging as if he's skewering in the metal just a tiny bit deeper and deeper with each movement, and Danny, well, he's going to put him out of his misery.

“I don't hold grudges.” Yanking on his jacket, he nods toward the exit. “Come on, before you provoke any more of the patrons and I have to take care of _your_ dead body.”

 

–

Two and a half months into his college experience, Danny's settled into his new life. Nothing is perfect, and annoyances he never even foresaw keep popping up.

He's always suspected it, but college has _proven_ to him that mandatory group presentations have a knack for waking up latent and deeply-buried homicidal urges. Red Bull quite possibly deserves to be recognized as a deity. Television has done a very good job of convincing the rest of the country that California consists of perpetually stoned surfers. The field of academics is not a strict meritocracy.

Danny also has enough proof now to know that the idea of college being a four-year long party has been a complete and utter lie. He is regularly swamped with coursework, and pulled his first all-night study session about a month into classes. He's come to the conclusion that every single professor is incapable of considering the idea that _their_ subject may not be the _only_ one that matters, and by week five, he's _itching_ for a break.

“Essay again, huh?” Stiles says whenever Danny mumbles a slurred, “G'd morning.”

Academic pressure aside, Stiles is another topic by himself. Danny knew from the beginning that he would never be in the running for Roommate Of The Year, but now, a couple of months into living and sleeping and silently jacking off in the same room as him, Danny's got a much clearer picture of him.

Once, when Danny was bored in his quantum physics class and some guy in glasses stared at him in a way that reminded him of Stiles, he decided to write a list of what makes Stiles a Difficult Roommate:

 

_Why Stiles Stilinski is not easy to deal with:_

 

  1. _Shows a curious resistance to rejection and will barrel on as if I was listening with rapt attention while he goes on about his newest theory on the prehistoric use of tools;_

  2. _(though that can be amusing sometimes if he throws in a joke or accidentally self-burns)._

  3. _Sometimes gets up in the middle of the night and leaves the room for no apparent reason at all._

  4. _(investigation may be necessary??)_

  5. _Talks to Scott on Skype on a constant basis. It's loud._

  6. _And uncensored._

  7. _(though that time he told Scott that Mr. Parsons was a cumsnozzling dickbasket was priceless)_

  8. _Takes pills before bed that he will not discuss. Always locks them away in his bedside table after use._

  9. _Does not understand what 'personal space' means._

  10. _Judging by his willingness to discuss basically anything in the library, at lunch, or in the middle of class, no firm grasp of 'public space,' either._

  11. _Asks inappropriate questions._

  12. _Often._

  13. _(No, circumcision doesn't have a long tradition in Hawaii, Stiles.)_

  14. _Stares at me a lot, especially when I'm half-naked._

  15. _Talks about how he needs to get laid a lot._

  16. _(These last two points have no connection to one another whatsoever)._




 

It's at that point that the professor interrupted Danny's note-writing time, putting his evaluation of Stiles to rest. The list is in Danny's bedside table now, stashed strategically beneath a historical romance novel that Danny's sure Stiles will never admit to having touched.

“So, how _is_ college? You're not telling me things,” Leila says, in the tone of voice that Danny has learned to mean 'I will not stop asking until you tell me' since she was about two years old. Maybe it's exactly this sort of extensive previous training that has equipped him so well for dealing with Stiles.

“I'm passing all my classes. It's really cold here; I actually had to wear gloves to walk to class the other day because I felt like my fingers would go numb. No, I don't have a boyfriend yet. I've made some friends. Everything's okay.”

“College isn't supposed to just be _okay_ ,” she says, and Danny can visualize her pout. “Self-realization. Self-reliance. Is my own brother going to rob me of all illusions?”

“Sorry, kiddo,” Danny says. “It's not magic.”

“Always so dry and technical,” she says. “So how are things with the roommate?”

Danny pauses at that. He's on his bed right now, talking to Leila while skimming the pages of the opened textbook in his lap. At the mention of Stiles, he glances over to the other side of the room.

Stiles has started putting up newspaper clippings of things he finds interesting; they clutter around photos of Scott and his other friends now. Stiles himself is out somewhere, probably at the library. They'll meet up at the bar later and then settle down and watch a couple of episodes of _South Park,_ as (two month old) tradition dictates. They'll laugh at the same jokes and then discuss the episode's political agenda and argue until Stiles resorts to insulting Danny's muscular proportions in a petty attempt to devalue his opinion. It's at that point that Danny will get annoyed and go to bed and vow not to watch anything with Stiles ever again, only for Stiles to ask, “Hey, so _South Park_ tonight?” the very next morning and for Danny to mutter, “Yeah, sure.”

Danny shakes his head. “They're okay. My roommate and I, we get along, kind of.”

“Is he hot?” Leila asks.

“You are too young to ask about some guy's hotness, Leila.”

“I overheard you talking about hot guys with the girl down the street from when I was, like, nine.”

“That is different.”

“How?” she needles.

“Because...” Danny breaks off. Stiles' hotness, or lack thereof, is a topic he hasn't been thinking about. It may or may not have been on purpose. “He's a total weirdo and not my usual type. Now that is all I'm going to tell my fourteen-year old kid sister about my love life --”

“Not your 'usual' type, but a type you didn't know you had?”

Getting outsmarted by females is probably Danny's fate in life.

So he resigns himself to a muted, “ _Fine_. I'll tell you if you tell me how mom and dad are doing.”

“Pfft.” There's a whistling sound on the other end of the line; Danny knows she's probably blowing up into her bangs. “Dad still sleeps on the couch, but they bond over talking about you and your physics stuff.”

“They still worry?”

“They always worry,” she says. “That's what parents do.”

“You're fourteen,” Danny reminds her. “You have no business being this wise.”

“Oh yeah, right, right. No, I hate them, they're so annoying and they don't let me do what I want, wah wah wah.”

“You finally understand the importance of age-appropriate behavior,” Danny says. “Which means I no longer have to tell you about my roommate. Bye.”

He can hear her high-pitched protest squeal just before he disconnects and puts his cell phone on the table. He doesn't notice his own smile until he's already up and getting dressed to head to his next class.

 

–

 

Three months and a week into his college experience, Danny finds out why Stiles had been so adamant about getting a single room.

When Danny opens his eyes, he can't place what woke him, but _knows_ somehow that something did. He lies there and waits, curled up to his side, until he can pick up the sounds from the other side of the room.

At first, Danny think that it's crying, that it's choking, but he soon hears that it's more like the gnashing of teeth, of fingernails tearing at a mattress. Danny keeps still and listens; he hears the staccato breath, the groaned and mewled and hissed noises. Then finally, a word, a single word, common and lovely, but said in a way that makes Danny's blood go cold.

In the morning, the chilly sun falls in stripes through the blinds. Danny watches Stiles get up and head into the shower without a word. When Stiles returns, Danny sits up on his bed and looks him in the eye.

The towel slips through Stiles' fingers, settles down around his shoulders. “You heard,” he says. Something dark and accusatory swings by in his tone. “If you tell anyone --”

“Why the _fuck_ would I do that?” Danny asks, his voice low with a rare show of anger. “I'm not a total bastard, Stiles.”

Stiles' face is an even plane, and its stillness is disconcerting. It's not right. Stiles is an annoying, weird kid whose face is a cauldron of movement. He's witty with a dash of morbid and equipped with a thousand fun facts about obscure topics.

Danny doesn't like how serious he looks now.

When Stiles finally breaks the silence, it's with a careful, “No.”

“What, no?”

Stiles' eyebrows draw together into a frown. “I mean, _no_ , you're not a total bastard.”

Cutting off their eye contact, Stiles walks over to his bed, falls down to sit on it, and rubs at his hair. His eyelashes flutter in thought, catch sparkles of sunlight from the window behind him. His lips are firm, strung tight along his face.

“We don't have to talk about it,” Danny says.

“Yeah, and we won't,” Stiles says, and that's the last he says to Danny for the rest of the day.

 

–

 

It's not the last they talk _of_ it, though.

A couple of days later, Stiles is on his way to Cryptology, Danny's on his way to English; the buildings in which they're held both lie in the same direction, so they walk next to each other, a careful foot apart. Stiles carries a red backpack, and has his thumbs hooked beneath the straps; he looks like an overgrown Boy Scout, but his face is set in stone in a paradox of child-like exuberance and crushing reality.

Chills bleed through Danny's jacket. They make small talk about the weather, about California, careful to step past the murky danger zones, the ones that are protected by huge, creaking _Jurassic Park_ -style signs that read, 'Do Not Discuss.'

Stiles ventures past one when he halts in front of Danny's stop. He treads against the floor, finally tilts up his chin to look at Danny, and says, “Yeah. As you probably guessed, this is why I really wanted a single, and I was understandably pissed to the point of near homicide at the administrative screw-up,” and for a good few moments, Danny doesn't know what to say.

Then he says, “Okay.”

“It doesn't mean I'm crazy, okay? Well, I'm not very crazy. A little crazy. Probably still in the way that qualifies me for, 'damaged in a sexy and mysterious way' in a rom-com flick, not in the axe-wielding, seriously deranged _Texas Chain Massacre_ way." 

“Okay,” Danny says.

“TV tonight?” Stiles asks. “Maybe not _South Park_ again. How about _The Big Bang Theory_? The actor who plays Sheldon is gay in real life, by the way. Would you do him?”

“Okay,” Danny says, not sure what he's okaying right now.

Stiles blinks. The sun dapples on his hair, and his shoulders tense. They're broader than Danny first thought they were, back when they met. “Did anyone ever tell you you're a bit of a push-over?”

“I told you,” Danny says. “I adapt.”

“Not complaining, I kind of like you. See you after class. And hey, get some snacks?”

Danny watches him leave. 

 Later, he doesn't know whether to get tacos or burritos or salted chips, so he buys all of them.

 

-

 

Danny never thought he'd ever end up with a regular hang-out spot, but four months into his college experience, every other night that is not spent arguing over television characters with Stiles, he spends at the  _Wolfsbane_.

“Welcome back, hot stuff,” Erica says, throwing a towel over her shoulder. “What were you doing yesterday? We missed you 'round here.”

“A bunch of hipsters came in yesterday,” Boyd says, carrying over a tray of empty beer bottles. “They asked us to change the music.”

“As _if_ ,” Erica says.

“Sorry. I had to write a 5,000-word paper yesterday and had exhausted my means of procrastination around midnight,” Danny says. “Braeden, Isaac, and Stiles are going to be here in a bit, can you make us some room?”

“We're kind of full,” Erica says. Blowing a bubble with her chewing gum, she rolls her eyes in thought. When the bubble bursts, she licks her lips, and says, “Boyd, go intimidate the losers on Table 3.”

Twenty minutes later, Braeden barges into the room, all leather-clad swagger and fire-bright smirk, with Isaac floating at her heels, floppy hair bouncing with each step. Just as they're all settled and Boyd has taken their orders, Stiles rushes in.

“Where the fuck have _you_ been?” Braeden asks.

Stiles looks stunned for a moment, then regains his balance. “In the last six hours, I've taken a grueling make-up exam, survived a phone call with my dad that consisted of a complete recollection of every meal within the last week, procured lunch, watched two movies, _and_ achieved orgasm. I'd say I've been productive.”

“I appreciate the sensory detail in this recap,” Braeden says. “Now sit down, loser.”

Danny didn't think that Braeden would ever do anything more than tolerate Stiles' existence, but to his surprise, she seems to have developed honest affection for him. Danny suspects that it's partly because Stiles makes the perfect target for any sort of verbal quip.

Isaac joined their group almost by accident a month ago. He's in Braeden's Contemporary Lit class, and she didn't think much of him until she overheard him telling another student that he worked at the cemetery. In a plot twist that surprised absolutely no one, Braeden seemed fascinated by cemeteries, which is possibly another reason why she ended up liking _Stiles_ as well.

“Guys,” Braeden says one hour and three rounds of beer later, “I can't believe that we have finals next week. Do you know what this means? Fuck. Danny and Stiles will go back to Cali and Isaac and I will go back to New York, and then we won't see each other for _weeks_.”

“Co-dependence is a slow beast,” Isaac says mildly, rubbing a thumb along his glass of beer. “You know what else this means, though? Time to compare notes. How many of our must-do college things can we all tick off?”

“Survive,” Stiles says, deadpan. “Check.”

Danny takes a shot. 

Braeden gives Stiles a _look_.

Stiles moves around in his seat, making a petulant face at her. “Well, I'm friends with _you_.”

“I wouldn't be so quick to check that box then,” Braeden says sweetly. “What else was on your list?”

“Make friends. Check. Not fail any classes. Check pending, but decidedly likely. Get laid. Half a check?”

Everyone turns to stare at Stiles. Danny takes another shot.

Stiles shrugs. “I made out with Clarissa from Cryptology.”

“That's not half getting laid,” Isaac says, matter-of-factly. “There's no laying involved in making out.”

“Because _you've_ been all that more successful, I'm sure,” Stiles quips. “What was that about the five-second impromptu run-in with Annabelle?”

“I hear those were expensive boxers,” Braeden says.

“Hahaha,” a passing Erica comments.

Isaac's jaw locks. 

Danny takes a shot.

Braeden's gaze sweeps over Stiles and Isaac and settles on Danny. “So, how 'bout you?”

“Not make my parents worry too much,” Danny says. He can still taste the alcohol in his mouth, seeping into the crevices. His tongue feels heavy, swollen. Maybe he should stop drinking, but right now, he just wants to just stop thinking for a while. “Check. Ish.”

“Checkish,” Stiles repeats.

“Getting laid wasn't on your agenda?” Isaac asks. “Come on. That's on _everyone's_ freshman agenda.”

“Speak for yourself,” Braeden says. “Unlike you two virgins, Danny isn't perpetually desperate.”

“I'm not a virgin,” Isaac says, nostrils flaring.

“Me, neither.” Stiles takes a sip of beer. “I got lucky on prom night, but that's been months now. I thought college was going to be _different_ , you know? Where are all the horny girls or gay-slash-bisexual-slash-heteroflexible guys?”

“Here it comes,” Erica says, swooping in to grab Stiles' empty beer bottle and flashing him a smirk. “The Lament of Stilinski's Libido, Act III, Verse IV.”

“Wait, guys?” Isaac says with a slow blink. “Gay guys-slash-bisexual-slash --”

Braeden huffs, and cuts the air with a wave of her hand. “Come on, Isaac. You haven't figured out yet that he's bi? _Puh-lease_.”

It's something that Danny has suspected for a while, but never asked about. Stiles' silence confirms it now; Danny's not sure how he feels about that.

It doesn't matter, of course, because Stiles is his roommate and it's like College 101 that you shouldn't be fucking your roommate because they're more permanent than is a good idea for a fling, and anyway, Stiles isn't even his type.

Which doesn't stop Danny from looking at him. He watches how Stiles hides his face behind his glass of beer. Observes his Adam's apple bobs when he swallows. Notices how he blinks after and drags his eyes over the wall in a way that Danny has learned signals tiredness in Roommate Speak.

“Guys,” Danny intones in the voice of a man having an epiphany, because that's kind of what it is. “I'm really drunk.”

Three heads snap around to look at him. Three pairs of eyes scrutinize him.

One pair of lips says, “Dude, you all right?” so it's the pair that Danny focuses on, and he notices by the shape of it that it's Stiles'.

Danny swallows. “Yeah. I dunno why I drank that much, I'm usually – sober. _You're_ the drunk one, usually. You're a lightweight. What do you weigh, one-hundred and thirty pounds?”

Braeden shifts a little closer to Danny. “Here, have some water, sweetie.”

And that, of course, is when Danny's mouth decided to go on auto-pilot. “When I was in my junior year in high school, I hacked into the school records and nearly got kicked out, which is why my parents didn't want me to major in IT and oh _Erica_ , one more shot, please?”

Three pairs of eyes _burn_ into Danny.

“Well, fuck,” Danny says.

“Wow,” Erica comments when she passes, her blonde hair bobbing with each step. “No to the additional shot, Danster.”

“What she said,” Isaac says, and takes a long sip of his beer.

“ _Water_ ,” Braeden insists, her voice hiking up an octave.

Danny gobbles the entire jug down in one go. When he puts it down with a satisfied 'ahhh,' everyone is still looking at him.

Stiles says, “Everything makes a whole lot more sense now. You've illuminated me.”

“Oh yes. My mission in life,” Danny says.

“Okay, he still has his wits together,” Braeden says. “Not all hope is lost. Who's walking him back to his dorm?”

Isaac clears his throat. Braeden eyes Stiles.

“Whoa.” Stiles throws his gaze around the group. “This is not how democracy works.”

“This is _exactly_ how democracy works,” Braeden says blithely. “We're on a good track record so far with the lack of dead bodies; we wouldn't want to compromise that.”

Stiles rubs his knuckles across his right eyes. “When will that running joke finally _die_?”

 

-

 

It's not a long walk from the bar back to their dorm room, but drunk as Danny is, it's a lot more challenging than he remembers it being. The length of their sojourn is not aided by the fact that Danny stops every couple of minutes to admire one of the streetlights or comment on the transient nature of stars, which Stiles shows a lot less appreciation for than usual ("Dude, cool it with the poetry.")

Stiles yanks open the door to their dorm room, ushers Danny aside, and shuts it with a measured backward kick. “Fucking _finally_. You're fucking heavy, you know that? Just why did you get so drunk? Wow, were you _drooling_ on my shoulder?”

“Stiles,” Danny says.

“Danny,” Stiles echoes. “Okay, fine, fine, fine, it's not so bad. Apart from the fact that I'd do this for you anyway since we're now friends, this is also a golden opportunity to henceforth hold this incident over your head for the entirety of next semester, so I'm not complaining. Now, let's get you out of your shoes.”

“Stiles,” Danny says.

“Present.” He places both hands on Danny's shoulders, and gives him a couple of surprisingly forceful shoves. “Now. On the bed.”

Bed. Yeah, okay.

An undetermined amount of time later, Danny is on his back, staring at the (increasingly blurry) ceiling, and feels Stiles wrestle with the laces on his shoes. One goes off, then the other. Danny wriggles his toes.

“Not taking off your socks, buddy, no offense,” Stiles says. “Do I have to tuck you in?”

“Stiles,” Danny says. “If you're still worried about the not getting laid thing, I could.”

Silence reigns.

The next thing Danny hears is Stiles climbing to his feet somewhere at the foot of his bed, and the sound of his heavy breathing. Then, a low, sordid, “What in the _fuck_?”

“I mean, I'd have sex with you,” Danny says. “If you wanted.”

“Jesus.” Stiles freezes. When he recovers his voice, it's low. “You're drunk. I'm not going to take this seriously.”

Danny blinks, and manages the monumental effort of moving his face enough to shift Stiles into focus.

“No, it's not just because I'm --”

The light around Danny dims. Darkness encroaches upon the edges of his mind, and he struggles to keep his line of thought. “It's because I'm --”

 

-

 

Danny wakes with a jolt, and it only takes a couple of feverish blinks of his eyes for him to decide that this must be the worst hangover he's ever had in his life.

He blinks first at the ceiling, then down his (clothed) body, to his socked feet. The taste of alcohol sticks to the back of his throat. He swallows against it. Tries to _think_.

When the memories hit, Danny sits up with gasp, blinking against the (searing, slicing, _painful_ ) light, thoughts racing and squabbling for attention, sensory details crowding at the front (the scent of Stiles' shirt, the confession, Braeden's sharp smile, Isaac's eyes, “ _I would have sex with you_ ,” Jesus take the fucking wheel), reaching for something (his dignity, possibly), and nearly falling down face-first onto the floor.

“Well, fuck,” he tells the empty room. The curtains billow in the breeze in front of the half-opened window.

He scans the room for any notes that Stiles may have left, finds none, and gets out his phone to check for a text. His screen saver blinks back at him. He checks his phone's menu to make sure that the language isn't set to Polish like it was that one time Stiles played a prank on him. It isn't.

He's just in the middle of a internal analysis of just how inappropriate he would be to just text Stiles an apology right now when he remembers that he has a fucking _quantum physics final_ today.

And that's how Danny, after almost a semester of nearly-impeccable college attendance, when the wildest thing he did was that one time he went to the gay club one town over, finally messed up.

 

-

 

When Danny scribbles his signature onto the exam and turns it in to a sallow-faced TA, he thinks that that could've gone worse. Hungover and unprepared, he had to guess on a couple of problems, but still, he's fairly sure on at least seventy percent of his answers. _Worse_ , he comforts himself. _Could've been a lot worse_.

Could've been better, too, if it had been IT instead of Physics. He shuts that voice down _fast_.

 _Worse, it could've been worse_ , is still his internal phrase of comfort when he goes back to his dorm that afternoon and Stiles is on his laptop as usual, surfing Wikipedia.

“Hi,” Danny says.

Stiles tosses him a look over his shoulder. “Hi.”

'Hi' is also better than 'you fucking scumbag' or something. This newfound optimistic worldview is working out splendidly for Danny.

Stiles swivels around on his chair. He's wearing boxers and a faded t-shirt with a band name on it, his usual chill-out attire for after-class dorm room time.

Danny walks over to his bed, collapses on top of it, and covers his eyes with the back of his hand.

“So,” Stiles prompts. His voice is unsure, light, almost unable to dig its weight into the air enough to be heard.

It's so unlike Stiles that Danny decides he doesn't like it at all. “So.”

“So. Danny. You know how I'm a fan of ignoring shit until it goes away?”

“I've noticed,” Danny says, his voice dry enough to scratch.

“Yeah, yeah, whatever. Anyway, like, last night. You were joking. Right?”

Danny can hear the way Stiles takes in his breath, shallow but fast. Danny removes the hand from his eyes, and props himself up on his elbows so that he can look at Stiles.

Sitting on his chair, legs spread, one foot tapping against the floor, Stiles looks at him like he expects a revelation.

Stiles is giving him the easy way out. Stiles _wants_ him to say yes.

So Danny does. “Yeah. I was joking.”

Stiles remains so still he could've balanced a pen on his head. Then, tension seeps out of his shoulders, and a miasma of emotions washes over his face, so fast that Danny can't analyze them all, and then he says, “Okay. We'll forget it about then.” Before Danny can be sure that that's really a hint of _disappointment_ that he sees on his face, he's already faced with the back of Stiles' head above the chair.

For about ten minutes, there is nothing but silence.

Then, Danny ventures forward with a, “So, how are finals going for you, then?”

Stiles looks at him over his shoulder. His lips are thinned, slope down moodily. “They blow, what else?” Something flashes in his eyes. “Wouldn't be so bad if they weren't the _only_ things that did.”

Is Danny supposed to say something to that? He's probably supposed to say something to that. Shit, and he used to be _good_ at dealing with Stiles –

Danny clears his throat. “Well. They blow for me, too.”

Stiles says nothing in return.

Danny decides to turn his back to Stiles, close his eyes, and try to take a nap. The _click-click-clack_ of Stiles' fingers flying over the keyboard follows him into his sleep.

 

-

 

Danny spends the rest of the week in an exam-induced haze. In the mornings, he gets up early to head to the library review whatever exam he has to take that day, powers himself up with an energy drink or two, and reads his notes until he goes cross-eyed.

He sees little of Braeden, or Isaac, or even Stiles. He sees Braeden once when he's on his way from the library to an exam, a steaming cup of coffee in his hands. The cold feels like a thousand tiny needles stinging his face, and he has his scarf wrapped so tightly around his face that he almost misses her in a blur.

They talk for a few minutes while the snow drifts down around them. She doesn't mention what happened at _Wolfsbane_ , but her smile is as slow as the fall of the snowflakes.

“Take care,” she says before she hurries off.

The days start to bleed together. Caffeine and stress-induced anxiety settle in his chest and set up camp there, stir his heart into mild palpitations, reach down to grab his stomach in a hardened clench. Jackson calls on Thursday, but Danny has to cut him off because he's on his way to his last exam for the semester, but not before Jackson gets in a few choice words.

“What the fuck is _wrong_ with you?” Jackson grumbles into his ear. “Too busy?”

“Some of us take higher education seriously,” Danny says.

“Yeah, fuck you and your high-ass horse. You sound like you're about to keel over and die from exhaustion. If you can't handle it, it's better to take it easy. Dead friends make lousy friends.”

Danny's lips twist into a smile. “Thanks for the concern.”

“You're not having another Trevor situation, do you?” Danny can visualize the sour expression on his face, all scrunched up forehead and downward-sloping lips. “Oh fuck me, you _do_ , don't you? We've been over this. And _over_ this.”

“Not a Trevor situation,” Danny says, taking a corner. The science building looms up in the distance now, grey and imposing like a metallic tower. He wonders why science buildings always look the least appealing and business buildings are always the nicest on every campus.

“Then what?” Jackson demands.

Danny releases breath out of his lungs. He watches how it coalesces, then climbs up the air like an opaque snake made of smoke. “Nothing. _Something_. There's a guy, but it's not working out. It's complicated. But, see, I really have to write an exam right now --”

Jackson barrels on as usual. “Do you like him?”

“What the fuck's _with_ you today?”

There's a growl on the other end of the line. “Don't pretend like it isn't a question that matters, especially to you.”

Danny reaches the science building, and throws a glance up the steps. Snow falls, hits the steps, and melts over them in a spread of glistening moisture. “I have to take an exam now, Jackson.”

Jackson gives a snort, one of these that he conjures up from the very back of his throat. “Well. Don't be stupid and get hurt again, like all those other times.”

“I'm not that fragile,” Danny says after a pause. “See you tomorrow? This is my last exam, I'm going back home tomorrow. I can swing by yours after I visit the family.”

“Whatever,” Jackson says.

Danny sighs. “Okay. I'm gonna answer your question, so here goes: I don't know.”

“What?”

“I said I didn't know. If I like him, I mean. He's not like Trevor – nothing like any of my exes, really, but he's not exactly, uh, _conventional_ , and anyway – nothing is going to happen. Not anymore.” A pause. “And I really have to write an exam now --”

“Wait – wait. It's not the crazy roommate, is it?”

Danny stays silent, because well, _shit_.

“Sometimes I'm not sure if this is a common saying over there on your team, but over here we like to pass down the age-old wisdom of 'don't stick your dick in --'”

“I _know_ ,” Danny interrupts. “We'll talk about this later. Ad nauseum, I'm sure. We'll talk about it. All right? Exam here? _Finals time_?”

“You and your pretentious Latin phrases,” Jackson says. His voice is tight, but Danny knows he's going to grudgingly respect Danny's request. “Fine. Good luck. See you tomorrow. Hope you don't screw up.”

Danny listens to the _click_ of his best friend hanging up on him, but keeps it pressed to his ear for another few beats before he pockets it.

Then, with one last deep breath, he walks up the steps.

 

-

 

When Danny goes back to his dorm room after the exam, Stiles is huddled in front of his laptop, an open Skype call spread out on the screen. He pauses it when he hears Danny enter and swivels around on his chair.

Danny's going back to California tomorrow morning. Maybe he'll miss the familiar sight of Stiles in front of his laptop as he is now, bathed in electric blue light, an intense look of concentration sprawled over his features. Danny sometimes watches him while he's on his laptop, how Stiles summons up variables and twists and pivots them in his mind.

Right now, _Danny's_ at the receiving end of that look. It spreads a net around the inner lining of Danny's stomach, pulls and tightens and squeezes them together.

“How did your exam go?” Stiles asks. His voice is measured, his eyes distant.

Danny shrugs. “I passed, but as for the grade, I have no idea right now.” He trails off, and watches Stiles over the distance.

Stiles processes this information with a blink. Just when he's about to turn back around to his laptop, Danny speaks up. “I'm going to _Wolfsbane_ tonight. It's my last night before I go back home tomorrow. Thought I'd hang out with the gang again.”

The words ripple in the air between them. He watches how they tense up Stiles' shoulder for just a moment before the effect dispels, the shoulders sag back down, and Stiles says, “Okay, buddy. Have the funsies.”

Danny's mouth feels dry. “You're not coming, then?”

“I already went last night because my finals wrapped up a day earlier than yours. I've got to pack.”

It doesn't suit Stiles at all, to be this cold and unenthusiastic.

Danny wishes he knew Scott as anything other than the constant presence on Stiles' laptop, on his phone, in his life, despite the thousands of miles of distance. Scott's on the screen right now, waiting for Stiles to return to the Skype call. Danny wonders if he's in the line of sight of Stiles' webcam right now. He wonders if those kind dark eyes can see him. What Scott would think of him. What advice he'd give. (What Stiles has _said_ ).

“Okay, then,” Danny says. “See you after, I guess.”

“Yeah, okay,” Stiles says, before he adds, “I may be out, though,” and Danny _knows_ he's supposed to say something, but he doesn't know what, so he says nothing.

He's getting so good at that.

 

-

 

Stiles _isn't_ out when Danny returns.

The farewell meeting at the _Wolfsbane_ went well. Braeden hugged him twice, then a third time for good measure, then boxed him in the shoulder. Isaac shook his hand and hugged him once. Erica and Boyd each voiced their affection in natural ways – “I can't wait for school to start again, this place sucks without you, have you _seen_ the jerks in here lately?” – and Danny kept his alcohol intake at a moderate level so he wouldn't mess up even more.

He exited the bar with a lightness to his step, as if he were being lifted up by the presence of his new friends, but each subsequent step seemed to weigh him down more and more the closer he got to his dorm room.

When Danny flings open the door and ushers himself inside, he's not surprised to see Stiles sitting on his bed, cross-legged, with documents of some sort on his lap, eyes boring into Danny.

Danny shrugs out of his jacket, tosses his keys onto his desk. He toes out of his shoes, bends down to arrange them on the floor, to the right of the door. Danny always puts his shoes to the right of the door while Stiles places his to the left; it's just one of the myriad ways in which they've arranged their lives with each other, where they scored out their respective spaces, measured themselves in terms of distance to the other.

Danny would have expected Stiles to say a number of things, but not this: “Are you drunk?”

Straightening his back, Danny swings his gaze over to look at Stiles. He's not in his pajamas yet, but wears a white shirt with grey pants. The lines make him look taller and leaner and somehow _bright_ , like a shift of light on a knife's edge.

“Not very,” Danny says. “No. Not at all, really.”

Stiles' jaw locks. “Good.”

“Why?”

“Because,” Stiles says, and gets up from the bed, unusually fluid, “you don't want to be drunk for this.”

Danny chuckles without a trace of humor. “That would depend on what _this_ is.”

Stiles takes another step toward him. Then another. “Here.” He holds up the sheets he'd been resting in his lap. “This is a formal request to change your major. Look, I've got it all filled out for you, I'm nice like that. Information Technologies. See there? You want it, huh?”

Danny can feel a headache rousing in his head. Fatigue crushes down over him. “What do you want, Stiles,” he says, and finds he doesn't even have the energy to raise his intonation at the end to make it a question.

“What do I want? What do _I_ want? Fuck, Danny, this is about _you_.”

He's been over this so many times in his head. “My parents don't want --”

“They don't want you to fucking _hack_ , is what they don't want.” Stiles' voice is hard. “They want the best for you or whatever, look I'm not claiming to know the intricacies of your quite frankly fucked-up family, but I've lived with your for an entire semester, and I do know that this is what you want, and you're an idiot for not pursuing it.”

“You don't know anything,” Danny says. A sort of mental clarity washes over him that he only ever experiences with the rise of _anger_. “You don't know _anything_.”

“Fuck you,” Stiles says with scalpel-like cruelty. “You want it, and the least you could do is give it an honest thought. Or twenty. Or however many it takes.”

“And what now? Am I supposed to thank you for this intervention?” Danny asks, his tone getting heated. “What, is it any of your business? I gave you the courtesy of respecting that you didn't want to fucking talk about your nightmares, and this is how you repay that?”

“That's not the same thing.” Stiles' teeth grind against each other. A vein pulses along his neck, blue and jittery. “That's my lot. _You,_ though, you are simmering in your imperfect existence with a life decision you're unhappy with but are too fucking chicken to change, and _that's_ where those two things are different.”

“I can't believe you,” Danny says. “I can't fucking _believe_ \--”

Stiles tosses the sheets to the ground. “Yeah? Is not saying what you really want a _thing_ with you? What was that, a few days ago? You'd do what with me?”

Danny wants to laugh. It's in his chest somewhere, those bubbles of resigned laughter, full of loathing and longing and fucking _resignation_. “ _That's_ what this is about?”

“It confirms a pattern,” Stiles insists. “I've done my research on this, okay? The entirety of your subsequent behavior indicates that you really were sincere, but you lied about it because you didn't want to risk anything for some reason or other.”

“And that's a _valid_ concern,” Danny says. This time, his voice takes a definite hike with his temper. “Who are you to tell me I can't have reservations on completely logical grounds that may trump what I want? Do you just take your shirt off in public whenever you _feel_ like it? In every situation, you evaluate possible outcomes and weigh them up –“

Then Stiles steps forward and kisses him.

Danny takes a sharp breath.

The kiss is brief, a mere press of lip to lip, and then Stiles breaks away. His eyes are hard as concrete. “That's not what I asked. I asked about what you _wanted,_ and _._ And _.”_ Stiles breaks off.

Stiles' mouth drops into an unbelieving 'oh,' before twisting into a nervous grimace. “Wow, shit, I just _did_ that. Wow. Shit. Okay, gotta get it together, getting it together over here, wow, shit.”

Danny kisses him back. Hard and fast and short.

Stiles stumbles backwards, as if Danny had delivered a blow to his face.

Part of Danny wants to step forward again and just kiss him again, because damn, he's been functioning on reason for so long that every so often, that deeply-seated part of his that just gets to get lost in the feeling fights to the top, but he shouldn't. He shouldn't. Think. _Think_.

Danny takes a deep breath, breathes out, closes his eyes, and when he opens his eyes, the red dots of anger in his brain clear away. He blinks, then again. And again. His breath steadies.

“You're a weirdo,” he tells Stiles. “You didn't actually _submit_ that transfer form for me or anything, right?”

Stiles scoffs. “Oh yeah, sure, I totally did, to ensure you'd hate me and my skinny ass until the rest of ever. _No_ , of course not, what do you think?”

“I think that if you promise never to be a dick and try to shove life decisions down my throat again, we can proceed to the sex talk for now,” Danny says. “Something tells me you'd like that.”

Stiles' mouth drops open, eyes going blank. Then life rushes back into them, and he shakes his head. “I'd like that, yes.”

“Good,” Danny says. A memory of an ex flashes over his retinas, and makes him wince internally. “Okay, first of all. I've learned this the hard way, so: ground rules first. This doesn't mean we're boyfriends yet. I haven't made up my mind about you completely. Let's see where it goes. Do you accept?”

Stiles stares at him.

“Look, this is exactly like a text pop-up in a role-playing game, where it says 'accept?' and comes with two little lines of different options for the answer.”

“Like you're in a position to make that kind of joke right now,” Stiles says. “You play more games than I do.”

Danny raises an eyebrow. “I'm sorry, are you the same person who kept accusing me of _missing the point_ two minutes ago?”

“ _Fine_ ,” Stiles groans. “I accept. Anything else? Before we proceed any further, hard kinks are out without appropriate discussions, as is breath play.”

“I don't know, that could come in handy right about now.”

“Okay, okay, I get it, less talking, more doing.” Stiles takes a step closer. He raises his arms and holds them inches from Danny's shoulders, all awkward, as if he were cupping an invisible aura or something, and says, “And now...”

Danny snorts, tilts his head to look him in the eye. When Danny runs a hand over his hair, Stiles snaps his mouth shut. When Danny kisses him, he stops moving. When Danny continues, he breaks.

Stiles feels smaller and shorter than he is, which reminds Danny of the fact that he's not his usual type. It's not hard to get into it, though, to kiss Stiles and push him back against a wall, to run his hands over his body, and enjoy it.

Stiles is sensitive and enthusiastic; his kisses are a little sloppy. He's hard against Danny's thigh in a matter of seconds, and heaves a deep breath when Danny slumps his weight against him and presses up against his cock.

“Oh shit, yeah,” Stiles says against Danny, his lips all wet and slippery when they move over Danny's mouth with his words. “Fuck, yeah, this is awesome.”

Danny kind of wants to tell him that inane running commentary isn't among his kinks, but he doesn't. He supposes that it's just one more of those Stiles things that were never his thing, but that strangely seem like necessary bits to a whole.

“Okay, tell me more.” Danny flashes Stiles a grin, nudges a leg between Stiles' thighs, and shoves his hands down his pants.

“ _Oh_.” Stiles jolts forward, stiffens, then relaxes with a groan, slumping back against the wall. “Oh yeah, that feels good. Shit, go on. Go on. A little harder. That's good, oh yeah, that's _good_.”

There's more commentary. Danny drowns it out when he begins to kiss down Stiles' neck, go lower, push up his shirt to tongue up to his chest and then down, down, and along the trail of hair leading down from his navel.

Stiles gives a choked-off sigh when Danny kisses down, then swerves to the side just before his cock to kiss down long his loins to his thighs. Stiles' cock is hard and hot and straining against Danny's cheek; he refuses to take it into his mouth just yet, not when he can tease just a little more and a little _more_ out of Stiles –

“Jesus, _Danny_.” Stiles' hands fly to Danny's head to tangle in his short hair. Stiles _yanks_. “Come on.”

Danny swallows Stiles' cock down until it hits the back of his throat, Stiles moans, and that's when Danny lets him take control.

Stiles is a great person to give head to. He's fantastically reactive, rewards each lick and swipe of Danny's tongue. Moans his appreciation at each stroke of Danny's hand. _Groans_ whenever Danny takes him in deep, until he can feel Stiles strain against him, high on nerves and pleasure.

When Stiles thrusts forward, he pauses right after and hesitates.

Danny hums his appreciation.

Stiles takes it the way he should: he begins thrusting forward, into Danny's mouth. Danny places his fist at the base of Stiles' cock, holds it there, buffers the movements. It's at this point that Stiles resumes his commentary, and Danny half-listens, only picking up pieces. “ _So good,” “just like that,” “that is the best”_ –

One word, though, he hears clearly over all the others. “Coming,” Stiles gasps, and Danny surges forward to take him in to the base. He swallows. And again.

When he gets to his feet, Danny is more turned on than he remembers being in a while.

“Wow, oh my God.” Stiles' chest jerks back and forth in staccato breaths. “That was – wow. So, at this point, I'm assuming you give your consent to my relaying this encounter in as much details as possible to Scott, because wow, this has to be shared.”

“Don't put it on Twitter.” Danny grins. “The brilliance wouldn't fit into the character limit anyway.”

“Cocky bastard.”

“Is it my turn?” 

Stiles' chest stops heaving for a second. His breath stutters. He licks his lips. “Is this like an RPG text pop-up, too, and if so, what are the possible answers?” He blinks. Once, then twice. “Also, is one of them 'I may probably possibly do a bad job because I've never actually done that before,' or something like that?"

“No, because that wasn't the question. The question is, 'do you want to?'”

“Well, that makes it easier,” Stiles says, and starts to yank at Danny's belt.

 

-

 

A good four months into Danny's college experiences and about as much time after he first made acquaintance to Stiles by way of his butt, Danny leaves for home. Both Stiles and Danny each brought their cars, so they ride separately, but they decide to start at the same time and catch up to each other at gas stations along the way.

Four hours into their drive, they halt at the first gas station and run into the shop for snacks and drinks. While Stiles is busy browsing the aisles of snack food, Danny goes to the beverages section and picks out one can of black coffee for himself and a can of cappuccino for Stiles. Danny never asked Stiles what type of coffee he wanted, but how Stiles prefers it is just one of the many things that Danny picked up about him in the past months.

After, they lean on the hood of Danny's car, opening their cans of coffee at the same time. The cold makes Danny's fingers go stiff, so he varies his grip on his can to keep them from freezing. He misses California, is glad that he'll be going back, that he has an entire break ahead of him where having to make sure that he doesn't bum away _all_ his time on the internet will be the extent of his responsibilities.

“So, Danny-boy,” Stiles says next to him. “On the account of the dramatics and the sexing, we haven't really discussed what we were doing over the break.”

“I'd call that a fair trade. Nothing too exciting lined up yet.”

“Telling your family how you got it on with your roommate is sure to entertain them,” Stiles says. “I'd bump it up on your priority list.”

“I'm not going to tell them anything,” Danny says. “They'd watch you too closely if I did, my sister would never stop asking you very inappropriate questions, and my mother would probably gift you with a knitted sweater before the break was over.”

It's amusing, how Stiles' mouth drops open to say something then snaps shut when a light goes on behind his eyes. “Oh. Oh, yeah.”

“If you want,” Danny adds.

“No, sure. Why not? Meeting the family and everything. Awesome. That's not going fast or anything.”

“Hold your horses,” Danny says. “It's because they're the ones who can potentially talk some sense into me if they decide you're just too weird after all.”

“Right,” Stiles says with a snort. “So, when can you open your schedule to include the sacred event of roommate-cum-sex-partner evaluation by family members?”

“Next week. I've got some stuff to think about before. And possibly talk to them about.”

Stiles pins him with what by now Danny has internally dubbed _The Look_ again: the one where he narrows his eyes as if they were zooming lenses on a telescope, to gather the intel needed for thorough analysis.

When Stiles' face relaxes, all he says is, “Good.”

Danny finishes the rest of his coffee, throws away the can, and leaps to his feet. “Don't look so smug, _your_ problems are next.”

Stiles frowns, but Danny ignores him. He'll deal, or he won't. _Danny_ will deal, or he won't. College is a time of self-realization after all. Not to the extent that movies made it seem, but more than Danny may have thought.

They each shuffle back into their cars, and Danny pulls back onto the lane, speeding after Stiles' Jeep up ahead.

A song on the random radio station he picked fades out, and there's a brief moment of static before the next song gears up and the first notes drop. AC/DC.

Danny turns up the volume.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
